Spiffy:

Iffy:

"Traits 2.0" may restrict character customization; no information on new PvMP.

It is the original dungeon crawl: The Black Pit that inspired a million Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules and acted as the template for every party that ever trudged into the depths of an underground world, torches at the ready. It is Moria and while the perilous journey of Frodo and his friends through the ruins of Khazad-dum takes up only a small portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien's tantalizing glimpse of forgotten chambers and mysterious caverns where nameless horrors and fabulous treasures wait has fired imaginations ever since.

We'd come to a place much less horrible but nearly as dark, a demonstration room with Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel and Lead Producer Cardell Kerr for a first glimpse at Mines of Moria, the first expansion pack for The Lord of the Rings Online.

Khazad-dum at 60

One of the biggest changes players will experience when they first fire up Mines of Moria is that their experience bar will start working again. Mines of Moria will raise the level cap from level 50 to 60 with all the attendant increase in power and skill. According to Kerr, the change from 50 to 60 won't be as dramatic as people think. "Our watchword is 'seamless integration'," Kerr said. "One of the worst things a massively multiplayer game can do is suddenly take a sharp turn at the level cap and become something completely different. Not only does it completely invalidate everything you've created before, it makes the leveling game feel useless." The Lord of The Rings Online stick to a fairly rigid advancement matrix that covers everything from player skills to traits to itemization and the 10 levels of Mines of Moria are being designed to slot into that without any sharp break.

That's not to say that Mines of Moria won't have plenty of big new toys for players to play with. According to Kerr, though, anything new needs to tie into the systems they already have. One example is session play. "When we first introduced session play, there was a real concern that players wouldn't want to leave their main characters," he said. The team's initial steps into session play were tentative; playing as a chicken in a challenging but ultimately amusing series of novelty quests and playing as a Troll or a Ranger in the Ettenmoors zone. The initial response to those was so positive that the team is planning on offering much more elaborate session play in Mines of Moria. "It's an incredible way to expand on our strength in storytelling," Kerr said. "There's a lot of history in Moria, a lot of famous and infamous events. By leaving their main characters behind in certain quests, players will get the chance to actually see some of these events with their own eyes."

Another example is the tweak to the trait system. When The Lord of the Rings Online was first launched, one of the justly praised elements was the game's "Trait" system. This was a talent-like system that would allow players to slot bonuses and special abilities at Bards in major towns. That meant that players could utilize specific traits for specific gameplay instances. A Loremaster going on a raid with creatures that do a lot of status damage would have a different trait set slotted than a Loremaster out in the world doing solo quests.